For many communicators, budget requests follow a familiar process. The comms team shows up to a meeting with a stack of metrics and tries to show their organization’s top brass how the communications department is making a difference.
Robert Goodfellow, senior director of global corporate communications and CSR at Colgate-Palmolive, told Ragan that too often, communicators lose ground in these kinds of conversations before anyone reviews any of the numbers and figures.
“If we start the conversation from a position of defense, defending our spending and trying to prove our value, I think we’re simply having the wrong conversation,” Goodfellow said. “We need to shift from defending budget and justifying our spend to talking about investing in what matters for the business, and in what matters for leaders and employees.”
Goodfellow said that framing comms as an investment for the company means tying communications activities like a newsletter refresh or an intranet overhaul to the larger purpose of the organization.
“You need to be able to articulate your purpose, both the company’s purpose and the function’s purpose,” he said. “For instance, at Colgate-Palmolive, our purpose is to reimagine a healthier future for all people, their pets and our planet. When you can articulate your why clearly, it helps you justify the recommendations you make down the line.”
Goodfellow will present on how communicators can strategically approach asking their leaders for more budget at Ragan’s Future of Communications Conference in Austin next month. To register, click here.
Do your homework before submitting an ask
Goodfellow said that at Colgate-Palmolive, the groundwork for budget asks is built with sit-down interviews with leaders instead of decks and spreadsheets.
“We asked them, when you think of the corporate communications practice at Colgate-Palmolive, what are the things that matter the most to you?” said. “The themes we kept hearing over and over again were safeguarding the company’s reputation, making sure employees are super engaged, knowing our community impact work is actually making an impact, and making sure comms is driving business outcomes rather than just creating outputs like impressions.”
He added that deep and detailed research into what drives Colgate-Palmolive’s reputation both internally and externally came next, followed by an audit of everything the comms team was already doing. Goodfellow said that audit asks two blunt questions of every program.
“Are there things you’ve been doing for the last however many years that simply don’t align to your purpose, that are just things we do to do them?” he told Ragan. “Are there things that give us interesting output metrics like impressions or clicks, but don’t give us any outcome metrics, like a change in sentiment or someone taking an action as a result of the communication? I don’t think you can go and make budget requests well without this foundation.”
Identify your partners before you need them
Goodfellow said that finance should be near the top of the list of partner departments for comms teams.
“My experience is finance wants us to be successful,” he said. “They’re accountable for how the money at the company is being invested. If you include your finance partners early, share your strategy and what you’re trying to achieve, they become invested in your success, because then they can feel proud of the results too.”
Other departments can do the same. Colgate-Palmolive’s old intranet was mostly a static page of links and wasn’t mobile friendly, which shut out the frontline employees who make up half of its workforce. By building the right partnerships and fixing it, the comms department was able to show leaders a win that went beyond just numbers.
“We partnered with IT on an RFP for a new intranet that would future-proof our tech stack,” Goodfellow said.“They were the ones who funded it, but we were their key client, and now we have a mobile-first intranet that includes frontline employees in 45 manufacturing facilities on five continents.”
When asked what advice he’d give to communicators who are asking their leaders for more budget, Goodfellow recalled a tactic he used during his time working in Colgate-Palmolive’s marketing departing.
“Rather than showing how tactics lead to an outcome, start with the outcome in mind first,” he said. “Understand your business strategy and your purpose, then work your way backwards from there. Don’t start from a place of, ‘Here’s everything we always do, and now let me tell you their value and how they help.’”
Sean Devlin is the senior internal communications editor at Ragan. You can connect with him on LinkedIn here.
